chapter four
Atlantic Records event with: (front row, left to right) Jerry Wexler, Alan Freed, and Ahmet Ertegun; (back row, beginning third from left) Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, and Mrs. Turner.
(Charlie Gillett Collection/Contributor)
Lew Chudd was concerned. The Mesner brothers, who ran the Aladdin label, had managed to score a coup by going to New Orleans to record Amos Milburn, and were getting hit out of hit from him. Chudd was on a talent-scouting tour in Houston at Don Robey’s Peacock Club and saw a set by a New Orleans trumpet player named Dave Bartholomew, who was a huge draw down there with his band, which included Red Tyler and Lee Allen on saxophones and a wiry drummer named Earl Palmer. Chudd immediately offered Bartholomew a contract, and asked him to look out for talent back home in New Orleans for him, with a nice signing bonus for acts he found. A few weeks later, Bartholomew sent him the results of the first session he’d done back home at Cosimo Matassa’s recording studio (the only one in town), Jewel King’s “3 × 7 = 21,” which became a top-ten hit right off. Next came a piano player, a twenty-two-year-old named Antoine Domino, whom everyone called “Fats.” Fats’s theme song was a thinly disguised rewrite of another New Orleans pianist’s signature tune, “Champion” Jack Dupree’s “Junker Blues,” whose lyrics dealt with heroin use and were not destined to adorn the rhythm and blues hit parade. “The Fat Man,” though, propelled by Fats’s signature right-hand triplets and his ingratiating voice, didn’t sound like anything else out there and just missed the top of the R&B charts in 1950, the first of what would be nearly sixty chart successes for him on Imperial over the next twelve years. Then Chudd and Bartholomew had an argument—over what, nobody remembers now—and Bartholomew got his revenge. In early 1952, Specialty’s Art Rupe was sniffing around town, giving mostly unsuccessful auditions, and he was about to give up when the next singer up broke down crying in the middle of his song. Rupe was impressed and set up a session. Who better to use as backup than Dave Bartholomew—and Fats Domino on piano? The only reason Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” wasn’t a Fats Domino record was that Price sang it. It was the top-selling R&B record of 1952 and sold lots of copies to white teenagers, too—not enough to chart, but enough for Alan Freed and Hunter Hancock to notice, and enough to cause Lew Chudd to beg Bartholomew to come back to work for him. Just to show there were no hard feelings, Bartholomew was allowed to work for other labels, and agreed to record Lloyd Price for Aladdin, a plan that was interrupted by the Mesners hearing a demo some teenagers had made at Cosimo’s. They spent several days looking for the kids, who eluded them, thinking that the only reason white guys would be looking for them was that they were in trouble, but once the Mesners found them, they dismissed most of the group and formed a duo of Shirley Goodman and Leonard Lee, whose on-record romance as Shirley & Lee enthralled teenagers for years later. (Price continued to record for Specialty until he was drafted in 1954.)
Shenanigans like this were what drove Sam Phillips up in Memphis to a desperate act in January 1952. He’d delivered Jackie Brenston to the Chess brothers, incurring the wrath of the Biharis at Modern in LA, and then he’d sent Howlin’ Wolf’s recordings to both of them, and, to top it off, he was watching the beginning of B. B. King’s rise to the top on the Biharis’ RPM label, which they’d set up, apparently, just for him. Sam had also made recordings by other artists for other labels that hadn’t done much—but what if one had? He was, as an old saying went, tired of fattening frogs for snakes. “I truly did not want to open a record label,” he said years later. “It honestly was the last thing. But I was forced into it by those labels either coming into Memphis to record, or taking my artists elsewhere.” He asked Jim Bulleit over in Nashville for some capital and came up with a name for the label, Sun, and a label design in yellow and brown, courtesy of an artist he’d known in school, featuring a rooster, a half-circle sun emitting rays, musical notes (which don’t form a tune), and a notation at the bottom of the circle saying Memphis, Tennessee. In February, he sent a dub of “Selling My Whiskey,” by Jackie Boy & Little Walter, to a couple of DJs in Memphis. Jackie Boy was vocalist Jack Kelly, and Little Walter wasn’t Muddy Waters’s remarkable harmonica player, but Walter “Mumbles” Horton (known as Big Walter after Little Walter achieved fame). The DJs hated it, and it wasn’t issued. Instead, he released an instrumental by Johnny London (identified on the label as an “Alto Wizard”), an alto saxophonist of undeniable talent whom Sam liked. Sun 174 was the number on the label, and it went precisely nowhere, but Sun Records was in business, sort of.
Sort of, because he discovered right off the bat that there were two other Sun Records companies in business, too. One was in New Mexico, making records to sell to Indians, and the other was a New York label recording Yiddish music. Somehow, Sam prevailed against them. But he couldn’t prevail against the fact that he hadn’t bothered to set up a distributor, relying on his brother, Jud, to drive around the South with boxes of records in his car. He knew the Biharis and the Chess brothers didn’t do that. And, with Sun trying to get a foothold, Sam still had to send artists he recorded to Chess, most notably Harmonica Frank Floyd. Sam had often told his secretary / right hand / mistress, Marion Keisker, that “if I could find a white boy with the authentic colored sound and feel I could make a billion dollars,” and Floyd fit those requirements except for the “boy” part; when Sam started recording him, he was forty-four years old, but his sound had been shaped by years of traveling the rural South with medicine shows. Chess put his records out, too, although it’s anybody’s guess who they thought they’d sell them to. Sam, meanwhile, was primed to record anyone he could, and that included country musicians. Nashville and Memphis have a history of country music rivalry, but Memphis has always lost, and part of it, Sam would discover, is because so many Memphis country performers were at least partially going for that authentic colored sound and feel.
Nashville, on the other hand, had taken Hank Williams’s new realism to heart. Things had been changing since 1949, when Floyd Tillman’s “Slipping Around” had been recorded by both the duo of Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely and Ernest Tubb, both records topping the country charts. The breakthrough record was Hank Thompson’s 1952 smash “The Wild Side of Life,” lamenting that he’d lost his girlfriend to the bar scene, where she’d be “anybody’s sweetheart” for the price of a drink. It was swiftly followed by an answer song by Kitty Wells, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” which decried the mind-set that put “the blame … on the women” when it was male misbehavior that drove them to it. Then Webb Pierce arrived to talk about his “Back Street Affair,” and, late in 1953, “There Stands the Glass,” celebrating the liquor that would obliterate his heartbreak and misery, and admitting that “it’s my first one today.” Nashville was getting gritty, singing about cheating and drinking, which became country staples, although blues artists had been singing about them since the ’20s. But you weren’t going to sell records like those to teenagers.
Nor did they seem hot on instrumentals, although some classics were coming out, mostly by jazz artists slumming in rhythm and blues: Jimmy Forrest’s “Night Train,” Illinois Jacquet’s “Port of Rico,” Count Basie’s “Paradise Squat,” and Johnny Hodges’s “A Pound of Blues.” But one of the biggest records of 1952 on the R&B side was a harmonica instrumental by Little Walter that he often performed to start off a set by the Muddy Waters band. He called it “Your Cat Will Play,” and it was tossed off during a recording session one day. Leonard Chess changed its title to “Juke” and decided to release it under Walter’s name, and it took off. On tour in Louisiana, Walter discovered it was selling like crazy, quit Muddy in the middle of the tour, and headed back to Chicago to put a band of his own together. That wasn’t difficult; he took over another young harmonica player’s band, the Aces, and changed their name to the Jukes. The harmonica player he’d replaced, Junior Wells, then joined Muddy’s band. That’s the way it worked in Chicago. Muddy’s band was informally known as the Headhunters because when they heard of a new talent in town, they’d go see what the noise was about and then do battle while Muddy relaxed with a drink at the bar. If the new kid shut Muddy’s guy down, he’d sometimes get an invitation to replace his rival. If, as was more often the case, Muddy’s band member triumphed, it was a reminder of who was at the top of the heap, a place Muddy Waters occupied for the entire decade. But now Chess had two major national blues stars.
The period of 1952–1953, in retrospect, seems to have been a stylistic watershed for rhythm and blues. Old-style jump blues was still around—Big Joe Turner was making some classic stuff for Atlantic, and Roy Milton, Charles Brown, and Amos Milburn had hits—but other solo artists were exploring a new area somewhere between blues and pop. One of the brightest stars was Johnny Ace, yet another Memphis singer, who was one of an informal group of young guys, the Beale Streeters, who hung around together and were locally popular. Ace’s “My Song” was a #1 record, and teenage girls went for him in a big way. (It was released on Duke, a brand-new label featuring Memphis talent, and Houston’s Don Robey, who already had a label called Peacock after his Bronze Peacock club, went to Memphis and bought Duke—and Johnny Ace—outright.) Texan Floyd Dixon wrote and sang in a wide variety of styles, and his “Call Operator 210” rocked the jukeboxes all year long.
Specialty had found a couple of local artists who would accomplish great things. Percy Mayfield was a songwriter and singer who was touted as “The Poet of the Blues,” although his work was far more in a pop vein. It wasn’t just hype, either; his “Please Send Me Someone to Love” is both harmonically sophisticated and lyrically accomplished. He, too, was very handsome, and had a devoted following, but an automobile accident in 1952 disfigured his face in a way that made him afraid to go out in public, which killed his performing career, although he continued to record and write. Jesse Belvin might have become as famous as any of this crowd if he’d stuck to a solo career, but he also recorded as Jesse and Marvin with Marvin Phillips (who went on to other hits as Marvin and Jesse, with a number of other vocalists being “Jesse” over the years) and was a member of the Hollywood Flames, one of LA’s pioneering vocal groups.
Another entertainment entrepreneur was Johnny Otis, who not only played drums and vibes with his own band, which he featured at his nightclub, the Barrelhouse, in Watts, but also served as a talent scout for labels like Savoy and Modern. His first big find was Little Esther (Phillips), who was fifteen when he discovered her and propelled her, backed by the Robins (and, of course, the Johnny Otis Quintette, under whose name the record was released) to the top of the charts with “Double Crossing Blues” in 1950. Esther’s foil on a lot of her records was Mel Walker, who also released records under his own name, backed by Otis’s crew. Few who knew about Otis realized that he was white; he was born John Veliotes, son of a couple of Greeks who ran a grocery in Berkeley, California. His first autobiography, Listen to the Lambs, concludes with a weird description of how he “became” black. Certainly the oddest rhythm and blues star of 1952 was a gay white singer who wore hearing aids and broke down crying during his act. Johnnie Ray may have been an anomaly, but he had a solid pedigree, being a star attraction at Al Green’s Flame Show Bar in Detroit, and his song “Cry” topped the pop and R&B charts. And on the East Coast, Atlantic was still having success with Ruth Brown, and, at the end of 1952, signed a guy who sounded a lot like Charles Brown and had had a couple of records out on Swingtime, Ray Charles.
But it was vocal groups who were really inventing a new style. The Dominoes, who’d scored with “Sixty Minute Man,” had a lead singer, Clyde McPhatter, whose emotional style was rooted in his early gospel experiences, and their “Have Mercy Baby” was 1952’s #3 R&B hit thanks to McPhatter’s pleading vocal. Gospel was the starting point for a lot of these groups. At Apollo Records, Bess Berman inserted a clause into the contracts of all her gospel signings saying that if they didn’t sell what the record company deemed a sufficient number of records, they should try secular music, a clause that made her top-selling gospel act, Mahalia Jackson, stomp off the label after it was suggested that if she sold that many gospel records, imagine how many R&B records she’d sell. (Jackson had, indeed, sung, but not recorded, blues in New Orleans before being saved.)
In 1951, Apollo had signed a gospel group from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, called the Royal Sons Quintet. They were showmen, ripping up gospel programs throughout the South with their vigorous choreography and bass singer Lowman Pauling’s stinging guitar. After a few gospel 45s that didn’t really do much, Bess invoked her secular music clause, but the group had no problem with it; they were young, and a lot of what they’d been doing could be rewritten as rhythm and blues. In October 1952, they stepped into the studio to try it out and recorded a handful of sides—“Baby Don’t Do It,” “Help Me Somebody,” “Crazy, Crazy, Crazy,” and “Laundromat Blues”—that would make them stars in 1953 under their new name, the “5” Royales. In fact, once they started selling records and touring, they found that another group, the Royals (who recorded for the King subsidiary Federal) was showing up and playing their gigs, as well as pretending to be the Royales. A lawsuit settled that, and the Royals became Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.
In Cleveland, Alan Freed had discovered a Chicago group, the Moonglows, whose leader, Harvey Fuqua, was a talented songwriter, singer, and vocal arranger, so Freed signed them to a management contract.
The first big hit of 1953 in the R&B world was a shot across the bow of the sophisticated crooners in the big cities. Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton came by her nickname honestly, and she growled, howled, and yipped her way through “Hound Dog,” calling out a no-good man who was little better than a cur and taking time for someone in the backing band—listed on the label as “Kansas City Bill,” but in reality Johnny Otis—to scream out a guitar solo. And those who might be inclined to dismiss it as just another piece of Negro depravity would be in for a surprise when they learned who had written it: a couple of former students of LA’s Fairfax High, sons of well-educated Jewish intellectuals. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had moved with their parents to Los Angeles in 1950, and Stoller had dropped out of high school to work as a musician with local dance bands. A drummer in one of them introduced him to Leiber, who was still in school, as a guy who wrote lyrics he thought might make good songs. Stoller was skeptical—“I thought he had in mind something that I would find saccharine and uninteresting”—but it turned out that Leiber was influenced by the records he sold at a record store after school, R&B records that were bought by black and white teenagers alike. “I wouldn’t say we were the only Caucasians interested in the blues,” Stoller remembered later, “but generally speaking it was unusual for teenage white kids to be involved, knowledgeable, and interested in black popular music.” They began to write songs, made a connection with Modern Records in the person of Modern’s sales manager, Lester Sill, who got one of their songs to Gene Norman, a local promoter of big blues shows, and through him they got to stand in the audience of a Gene Norman Blues Jamboree and the Shrine Auditorium in 1950 and hear Jimmy Witherspoon sing one of their songs. Not long afterward, Sill took them to New York to meet the A&R men who gave songs to performers to record, including Bobby Shad of Mercury and Ralph Bass of King. Bass moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter to open a new King subsidiary, Federal, and gave the two regular work. Johnny Otis got the word that there were a couple of good songwriters in his backyard, so he’d have them over to his house to work with his latest discoveries, which was how they met Big Mama Thornton. “Hound Dog” was their first really large hit, on Don Robey’s Peacock label, and, because they were only twenty when it took off, they had to get their mothers to sign as their legal guardians in order to deposit the check. It bounced.
* * *
Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery, but in the music business, it can get you sued. One fad that was gaining force was the answer record, where the “5” Royales’ “Baby Don’t Do It” got answered by Annisteen Allen’s “Baby I’m Doin’ It” and Ruth Brown’s smash “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” harvested a bunch of answers like “Daughter (That’s Your Red Wagon),” by Swinging Sax Kari with Gloria Irving, “Papa (I Don’t Treat That Little Girl Mean)” by Scatman Crothers, “Pappa!” by Bennie Brown, and Wynonie Harris claiming that “Mama, Your Daughter’s Done Lied on Me.” The majority of these records disappeared shortly after being released, but more than a few of them copied the melody, arrangement, and a good part of the lyrics of the original. Nobody cared because the record would be dead by the time they got a lawsuit together, and anyway, there was no real money involved. But not everyone was so lucky.
Sam Phillips had had a rotten 1952 and after a couple of releases suspended Sun Records and went away for a little nervous breakdown, something he’d done before. In January 1953, though, he brought his brother, Jud, into the business as business manager and got him to stake him some more operating capital, since he’d run through Jim Bulleit’s pretty quickly. There was a sense of urgency; that same month, Lester, the eldest of the Bihari brothers, came to Memphis to open yet another in the Modern family of labels, Meteor, and Don Robey had already grabbed up the Duke label on the strength of one artist’s hit. This was formidable competition, but Sam had several years’ experience on the ground in Memphis, which neither of the other men had. (He might also have been relieved to know that Lester Bihari was sent to Memphis as much to get him out of the Modern offices, where he ran the stockroom and chatted endlessly with customers instead of taking care of business, as to establish a beachhead in Memphis.) Sam immediately released three records he’d recorded in late 1952, including one by Joe Hill Lewis, and although they only sold locally, they sold: as part of his untangling his previous affairs he’d assigned distribution to Jim Bulleit, one less thing for him to worry about. Then, in March, he decided to get in on the answer record fad, and “Hound Dog” was a perfect target. As for the singer, he chose a prominent longtime local showman, Rufus Thomas Jr., who had a show on WDIA, and emceed the talent shows at the Palace Theater, where B. B. King had gotten his break along with a long list of others. “Bear Cat” was no masterpiece, but it was entertaining enough—and close enough to the original to get shot down right away, but it had gone into the R&B top ten before the cease-and-desist order was signed. June saw Rufus stick with the menagerie and record “Tiger Man,” a superior record that didn’t do as well, but wasn’t going to get anyone sued since Joe Hill Lewis wrote it specifically for him.
Acts wanting to get signed had always come to Sam, but now he was someone to be reckoned with—he’d had a hit, even if it had gotten him sued.
Joe Calloway, who worked in radio in Memphis, had gone out to the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville to produce a news story on five guys who’d formed a singing group in prison, and thought that not only did they have talent, but they’d written a song, “Just Walkin’ in the Rain,” that could be a hit. Sam agreed, and arranged for the group to record it at Sun, surrounded by armed guards. He then named them the Prisonaires and had DJ copies of the record pressed on clear yellow plastic with black bars. It was a lovely light ballad in the mode of the Orioles, with Johnny Bragg’s lead tenor sounding a lot like Sonny Til’s. The record sold fifty thousand copies almost immediately, but a tour was out of the question, although the group did do occasional weekend shows, heavily escorted by lawmen, around the Nashville area.
An act that wasn’t constrained that way, one of the city’s top attractions, stopped in that June and recorded the first in a series of classic sides for Sun. Herman “Little Junior” Parker had been a member of the band Howlin’ Wolf had left behind when he moved to Chicago, and he was one of the Beale Streeters along with Bobby Bland, Johnny Ace, and Rosco Gordon. Putting together his own band, the Blue Flames, he cut “Feelin’ Good” for Sam and watched it go into the R&B top ten. In August he came back and recorded “Mystery Train,” but it only sold locally. And if proof that Sam’s fortunes had changed were needed, Ike Turner returned to him that summer with some talent: Johnny O’Neal, “Little” Milton Campbell, and the star of Ike’s latest version of the Kings of Rhythm, his wife, Bonnie. The tapes piled up; none were issued, presumably because Sam knew not to expand too rapidly, and it was all he and Jud could do to keep filling the orders for the records they’d already issued.
* * *
Vocal groups really charged ahead in 1953, with the Orioles scoring a massive summertime hit with “Crying in the Chapel,” a country tune that had been a hit for Darrell Glenn and cowboy movie star Rex Allen that spring, but which fit Sonny Til and his crew like a glove, so much so that it almost cracked the pop top ten. Billy Ward and His Dominoes were enjoying a wonderful year, thanks to Clyde McPhatter; they followed up a top-ten hit, “I’d Be Satisfied,” with one of the most bizarre records yet, “The Bells.” McPhatter becomes more and more unhinged as he listens to the church bells tolling for his girlfriend’s funeral and ends the record screaming with grief. It’s not an easy record to listen to, but it achieved a #3 position on the R&B charts and became a highlight of the Dominoes’ show. The other side, “Pedal Pushin’ Papa,” was a hit, too, although it was David McNeil on lead vocals, and then Clyde came back with “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).”
Because vocal groups were big on the East Coast, the Dominoes played Harlem’s Apollo Theater and Birdland frequently. Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun was at Birdland one night that summer to see them and noticed that McPhatter was missing. Between sets, he went backstage and casually asked Ward why. Ward was known as a hard guy to work for, with numerous demands put on his employees and a hair-trigger temper. His answer to Ertegun was concise: “I fired his ass.” Ertegun was soon on the pavement outside the club hailing a cab and talking the driver into taking him to McPhatter’s Harlem apartment, and took the singer to dinner, where he convinced him that he should sign with Atlantic. McPhatter had some friends with a gospel group, the Thrasher Wonders, who wanted to go secular and sing with him, and after auditioning at Atlantic, they were signed, too, and took the name the Drifters. Their first song for the label, “Money Honey,” became the top-selling R&B song of the year. (Billy Ward wasn’t too upset—Atlantic had just inherited his problems, in his opinion—and he found another lead singer named Jackie Wilson, a former boxer who had been singing gospel and pop tunes in Detroit at the Flame Show Bar.)
Atlantic wasn’t much on vocal groups, although the Clovers were on the label and selling respectably, but the Drifters weren’t a street-corner-style group, and had a couple of guys who could take the lead; in this they bridged old and new vocal group styles. Producing “Money Honey” was in the hands of Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the young former Billboard journalist who’d coined the term “rhythm and blues” at the magazine, who’d been hired when Herb Abramson was drafted, and who was at last ready to get his hands dirty in the record business.
Atlantic was slowly gathering force, which Abramson’s departure only interrupted a little bit. They had Ruth Brown, who was proving a most versatile artist (her 1953 hit “Wild Wild Young Men” is an early rock & roll classic, while her big hit that year, “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” was black pop at its finest), Big Joe Turner (who was doing some of his best work ever for them), LaVern Baker, formerly known as “Miss Cornshucks,” who was still a developing talent, the Clovers and the Cardinals and the Drifters, and Ray Charles, Ahmet’s pet project, with whom he and Abramson had already cut a couple of singles that hadn’t gone anywhere. Two of them, “Losing Hand” and “Mess Around,” are the subjects of a remarkable tape recorded on May 10, 1953, with Ertegun teaching Charles the latter tune, which he’d written, practically bar by bar. A lot of label owners reflexively took all or part of the songwriting credit for their artists’ tunes, aware that the publishing copyright was far more valuable than ownership of a recording, but it’s obvious from this that Ahmet Ertegun (or A. Nugetre, as he signed himself) was a fan and a lover of the music and that he understood what made it tick, even if he couldn’t sing and had to talk the lyrics in his crisp, accented voice. (Nugetre’s songwriting was so varied and so successful that Syd Nathan ordered Carl Lebow, his A&R head, to find him and lure him away. Finding no Nugetres in the New York phone book, he called Atlantic asking how he could find him. The person on the other end of the phone suggested he spell the name backward and hung up.) One thing was certain, though: under Ertegun, Abramson, and Wexler’s guidance, Charles was leaving his Charles Brown imitations behind and using more gospel techniques in his vocals.
* * *
One artist everyone wanted to land was Elmore James, a Mississippi-based guitarist whose style consisted of one guitar lick based on the one Robert Johnson had used in “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” which James had re-recorded in 1952 as “Dust My Broom” for Trumpet, a Jackson, Mississippi, label owned by Lillian McMurry, whose husband owned a radio repair shop in which James worked. This version of the tune, which James re-recorded often, featured harmonica work by a guy who called himself Sonny Boy Williamson, whether in homage to the Bluebird blues star who’d been murdered in 1948 or just to confuse people who didn’t know that the original was dead. At any rate, this Sonny Boy had been born in 1910 (four years before the other guy), had been one of the musicians who’d hit the road with Charley Patton in the ’30s, and was probably named Aleck “Rice” Miller. The record was a top-ten hit, and both Modern and Chess went looking for him. Mrs. McMurry, who wanted to establish a music industry in Jackson for the Mississippi musicians who hadn’t defected to Memphis or Chicago, held firm, but that didn’t stop James from taking a bus to Memphis and presenting himself to Lester Bihari, who immediately recorded him and issued the first Meteor recording, “I Believe” (practically identical to “Dust My Broom”) as fast as he could. It, too, went into the top ten. Presumably his brothers back in Los Angeles were finally proud of him. They didn’t know (nor did Lester) that he was about to make a huge mistake.